Elise/Development
Elise's Designers |narrative = |artwork = Mushk Rizvi Steve Zheng |visual = Albert Carranza Michał Niewiara Christina 'STEEN' Wun Mike 'ohmikegoodness' Laygo Sam 'cgsammu' Yang Matthew Johnson Kevin Leroy |sound = Adam 'BelligerentSwan' Swanson |lead = Elise's Designers |voice = |Japanese Voice Actor}} |conceptcredit= by Albert Carranza }} Priscilla, the Spider QueenElise's first iteration Elise (originally Nidalee, and then Priscilla) was first in development back in 2009, but did not make it through the development phase.http://forums.na.leagueoflegends.com/board/showthread.php?t=2699560 Elise's first iteration] For years to come, her artwork and spell icons would remain in the game files. While her original name was later used by , it was confirmed by Coronach that there was no other relationCoronach debunks speculation about Heimerdinger and Nidalee. It has been speculated that Priscilla's silhouette may have inspired original design. , an item released with the launch of Dominion in September 2011, was named in homage to the Spider Queen, although the item was removed shortly after. There was a poll on the League of Legends forums petitioning for Riot to bring the Spider Queen into the game, which received over 24.000 votesSpider Queen Peitition. She would later be reworked into . Elise, the Spider Queen Revealed By NeeksNaman Elise, the Spider Queen Revealed This patch, we'll welcome a champion with a lot of history into the League of Legends lineup: Elise, the Spider Queen. Originally over three years ago, proved to be a challenging champion to fully realize. Finally coming together as a transform champion, Elise has the ability to assume the form of either a regal mage or a . ;Abilities (Human Form) I= ;Spider Swarm Elise's spells will ready a spiderling when cast on an enemy. |-|Q= ;Neurotoxin Elise damages a target based on . |-|W= ;Volatile Spiderling Elise releases a venom-gorged spiderling that explodes when it nears a target. |-|E= ;Cocoon Elise fires a skillshot that the first enemy struck. |-|R= ;Spider Form Elise transforms into a menacing spider with new abilities. While in Spider Form, Elise deals on attack and has increased Movement Speed, , and . Each level of her ultimate allows Elise to summon an additional . ;Abilities (Spider Form) I= ;Spider Swarm Elise summons her spiderlings to fight by her side. Spiderlings deal and take reduced damage from multi-target abilities. |-|Q= ;Venomous Bite Elise lunges forward and bites her target, them and dealing bonus damage based on how is. |-|W= ;Skittering Frenzy Elise and her gain and heal her on each attack. |-|E= ;Rappel * Elise and her ascend high into the air and descend upon an enemy target. * Elise and her ascend high into the air, becoming untargetable for two seconds. Casting Rappel on a nearby enemy during this time will descend upon your target. |-|R= ;Human Form Elise transforms into a human form with new abilities. Each level of her ultimate allows Elise to summon an additional . Like all transform champions, successfully playing involves balancing two distinct kits. More than any of her counterparts, however, the Spider Queen's two forms embody distinct, but complimentary roles. Unlike , whose kit emphasizes flowing smoothly between and skillsets, or , who uses her to split push and create distance for her attacks, Elise's two ability sets separate definitively into mage and assassin roles. In her mage form, Elise specializes in keeping her distance using low-cooldown nukes and crowd control abilities. Her spells emphasize wearing down high-health targets in preparation for a brutal finish in spider form. At the heart of this gameplay is which deals damage based on the opponent's current health. While in this form, she also generates a each time she casts a spell. Upon transformation into a , she summons these spiderlings to fight alongside her. Investing the time to build up your minion count is essential to performing a perfect assassination. Once she's switched to her spider assassin form, Elise's kit takes on an entirely different theme. She gains a number of bonuses to her melee capabilities, and her become active to help rapidly damage an opponent. Using , she can ascend above the battlefield, vanishing from sight and becoming untargetable for a short duration. Once she's suspended, she can lower herself upon a nearby target, surrounding them with spiderlings. Boosting her minions' Attack Speed with can quickly burst down a surrounded enemy, leaving them vulnerable to execution with . Using both spider and human form effectively is the key to making the most out of the Spider Queen. Having the good judgment to stay safe in your mage form while you fight to create the opportunity for a clean spider kill will make or break your success on the Fields of Justice. Inside Design: Weaving the Spider Queen's Web By ByronicHero Inside Design: Weaving the Spider Queen's Web , the Spider Queen, is poised and ready to unleash her horrific powers on the Fields of Justice. We spoke to some of the Rioters involved in bringing Elise to life and asked them about the challenges of arachnophobia, visual design, sound design, and what's so damn cool about transforming into a monstrous, man-eating spider. Here's the inside scoop on Elise from the developers behind this dangerous new champion. * Steven "Coronach" DeRose: Game Designer * Christina "RIOTSTEEN" Wun: Senior VFX Artist * Mike "ohmikegoodness" Laygo: Senior Animator * Iain "Harrow" Hendry: Associate Creative Designer * Sam "cgsammu" Yang: Character Artist * Mark "Riot G Mang" Sassenrath: Game Analyst * Adam "BelligerentSwan" Swanson: Sound Designer :ByronicHero: Let's get the most pressing question out of the way, first: Elise is a spider. Were there any arachnophobes on the team? RIOTSTEEN: It was hard for me to work on Elise because I'm very scared of spiders. She would never have been my first choice to work on. When playing as Elise, I never transformed into the spider because her little spiderlings would freak me out when they were skittering around. I got over it eventually, and watching her creepy animations became pretty cool. As long as it was scary, we were doing it right. It didn't help that ohmikegoodness isn't at all arachnophobic. I think that he actually enjoyed animating Spider Queen a little too much. ohmikegoodness: Animating Elise was awesome because there are lots of tiny movements that you can make to give her an unnerving, grotesque feel, even when the character in front of you is supposed to be a beautiful woman. Originally, when I was animating her human female form, my intent was to create a huge gap between the human and spider forms. When she's human, she's human. When she's a spider, she's a monstrous spider. I wanted to give the spider legs that protrude from her back a twitchy, erratic vibe. I had to de-creepify her a bunch, make her stand up straight and reduce a lot of the twitchiness because it was just too frightening and unnerving. When our animation director RiotBamDragon goes over animations for review, he looks at everything for little fixes. I found it weird that he only had suggestions for the female-form, when he's usually more comprehensive with feedback. I quickly realized that he never looked at the spider form because he's terrified of spiders. "The spider's fine. Spider's fine. Just ship it." I asked him, "Did you even look at the spider?" "Yeah, I'm sure it's fine," he hastily replied. So the team put a big spider over his desk for the Halloween decorations. I think it's still there. Harrow: I do feel bad for the arachnophobes, especially when you use one of Elise's signature spider-form abilities, Rappel. You climb up and out-of-sight before dropping down on foes. You can easily creep people out with sounds, too- skittering noises and such. Hopefully, all of these things are fun for the summoner playing as the Spider Queen and horrifying for the players getting devoured by her. Riot G Mang: Arachnophobia became a big talking point during her development. It's not something I think about on a daily basis. She actually became too scary, so we had to tone it down. Also, something that I didn't know was that arachnophobia is pretty much a uniquely western phenomenon. In China, for instance, there isn't the widespread association between spiders and scary that we have here. :ByronicHero: Could you tell us about creating the Spider Queen's look and feel? cgsammu: I got to work on the spider's visuals, and she looks totally cool. Working on Elise's spider model was challenging because of the Shadow Isles theme combined with the look of the spider we were going for. Originally, she looked too… metallic? Futuristic? We wanted more organic designs rather than sharp, segmented plates, so we found a middle ground. Iian: At first glance, you see an elegant spell caster. There are plenty of hints to show players that she's got something creepy hidden below the surface. Spoiler alert: she's a giant spider. ohmikegoodness: She was invading people's dreams. It wasn't even the base skin- it was her launch skin, which is almost creepier than the regular spider in many ways. Wait until you see that! I watched a lot of video reference for the Spider Queen, lots of black widow footage. Black widows are awfully creepy… :ByronicHero: How about Elise's sound design? What were you aiming for with her voices and sound effects? BelligerentSwan: We had to find as many iconic spider sounds that would really nail the skittering of a terrifying spider, replicating that feeling you get when you hear Fiddlestick's ultimate or "Darrrrknesssssss" from Nocturne; you're terrified because you know what's coming only a split second before it happens. Thankfully, I didn't have to tone down her audio creepy-factor for the lady version as much as ohmikegoodness had to for the look of the human form. With the spider, my imagination could fly with sound design. With the human form, you have an expectation of what she might sound like. :ByronicHero: How does Elise's story play into her abilities? Harrow: Horrifying spider monster? Horrifying Shadow Isles? Seemed like a perfect fit. She's a cult leader figure and gets her power and immortality by feeding a bunch of people to this horrible spider creature, draining his venom, and creating a concoction that fuels her abilities. So, like any good cult leader, she promises the great power and immortality of the spider god to idiot cultists that follow her to their deaths in the Shadow Isles. In actuality, she just feeds them all to a spider. The promise of beauty, then the ultimate deception- it's paralleled in her play style. :ByronicHero: Tell us a bit about Elise's two forms. Coronach: Elise's human form is all about crowd control and initiation. The damage you deal with Neurotoxin is based on your enemies' current health. You're encouraged to start fights in human form. Spider form is all about commanding your army of spiderlings while dishing out damage and skittering around the fight. It gets pretty creepy with Rappel, leaping up and over jungle tree lines to create gank opportunities, leaping over a line of minions to close the gap, or as an escape if she's under serious pressure. If the enemy can kill your spiders, they can essentially knock you out of the fight by forcing you to transform back into human form to build up your army again. Players' skill with Elise will be dependent on gauging when to transform into her spider form to secure kills. Dynamic usage of the two forms based on what stage of the fight you're in will be crucial. :ByronicHero: How do Elise's spiderlings play into her abilities and fighting style? Coronach: Each spell you land in human form racks up another spiderling that spawns when you transform, up to a cap. You build up an army and transform to deploy your spiderling forces. An army of spiderlings was the hardest aspect of her kit to balance. It had to be fun and effective, but not frustrating to play against. We're using some more robust, more advanced AI with Elise's spiderlings to make them feel more responsive. You get to have more spiderlings each time you level up her ultimate, and they do this neat fan-out pattern after you transform into spider form. Many of Elise's abilities affect the spiderlings in some way as well, so you feel like you're bolstering your entire army. As long as we keep iterating on this technology, we can incorporate it deeper into the game. :ByronicHero: What were some of the more challenging nuances of Elise's animation, such as emotes and dancing? ohmikegoodness: Doing the emotes for Elise was a bit challenging — how does a spider laugh or dance? The spider laugh is pretty adorable. You'll really love it. I can't believe we managed to make something on this champion adorable, but it happened. She does the cancan as her dance. Naturally, it was the best fit considering the legs and all, but we thought it would be really cute if the spiders danced along with her. So they do. Adorable. Elise's human form laugh was so simple. She had to be dainty, so we used her creepy spider legs to cover her mouth while she laughed; just a simple pose that evoked so much character. :ByronicHero: Let's talk a little bit about how the Spider Queen has changed from the original concept. What are some of the key differences between the original Spider Queen art from years ago and Elise we know today? ohmikegoodness: We had a lot of changes to her model and the very look and feel of the character. Originally, she had legs as a dress, extra legs on her back; there were a lot of legs. The original concept was a Victorian-esque half spider-woman with a female torso. We realized that this wasn't something we wanted to go with, but we wanted to keep a lot of the elegance and grace, with the frightening spider as a hidden treat. The silhouette has to be recognizable and not too messy. You have to be able to quickly recognize Elise on the battlefield. She's one of the most visually interesting characters we've developed and it would've been a shame having her too busy and too messy that you've never get to appreciate her. :ByronicHero: Did anything odd crop up during the Spider Queen's development? RIOTSTEEN: Making her webs webby for lack of a better word was a challenge. Webs are sometimes impossible to see, like that's kind of the whole point of webs. And iridescent is a look we try to shy away from. At the same time, you want to make the webs instantly recognizable. Since she's from the Shadow Isles, she had to be mysterious and magical as well. Her color palette had some pieces to it that just didn't mesh well together. It was hard for me to pull off, but in the end, I mixed in more real webs with some magical elements and was happy with the result. I think everyone will like it. In team fights, there's a lot going on. You instinctively want to dial the effects back to not clutter up the screen. You don't want to make every ability extra flashy because you can potentially confuse players. Elise strikes a nice balance. BelligerentSwan: We have the same issue in sound design, as well. As we improve technologies and create new stuff, we don't want to overshadow the sound effects from earlier champions with louder cacophony. We have to be very careful when picking and choosing new sound styles. Picking the right sounds to accentuate each champion's defining characteristic is the key. We focus on what makes Elise stand out. Now, multiply everything with the Spider Queen by two, because she's got two forms, each with its own distinct flavor. At the same time, she has to fit in with the other champions. Frustrating? Occasionally. But once we hit the right balance across her abilities, with a unique sound effect that we've honed in on as her signature thematic element, it just worked so well. :ByronicHero: Anything else you want to share about Elise? Harrow: We wanted a Spider Queen with a jarring, frightening transition between two forms. I think we've achieved that. Coronach: There was a lot of appeal in watching Elise swap forms. We had to give her something more than just a hot lady who turns into a spider. She looks twisted. ohmikegoodness: Some characters are very straightforward to create. The Spider Queen originally began as something much different, but that evolution was what made her special. She's decidedly jarring in that she goes from the regal perception to a monstrous, devouring beast in a split second. You almost forget you're fighting an immensely powerful creature until it's too late. Harrow: Happy Shadow Isles, summoners. Here's some nightmares. }} Media Music= ;Related Music LoL Login theme - Chinese - 2015 - Blood moon| LoL Sounds - Bloodmoon Elise - Beat| Ignite (ft. Zedd) Worlds 2016 - League of Legends| |-|Videos= ;Related Videos League of Legends Sounds - Priscilla Voice| Elise Champion Spotlight| The Hunt of the Blood Moon Blood Moon 2017 Trailer - League of Legends| VFX Folio Super Galaxy Elise| Together We’re Unstoppable Super Galaxy 2017 Skins Trailer - League of Legends| League of Legends Animation Demo Reel - 2017| |-|Gallery= Priscilla Concept 01.png|Priscilla Concept (by Riot Artist Albert Carranza) Elise Teaser 01.png|Elise Promo Elise Concept 01.png|Elise Concept (by Riot Artist Paul 'Zeronis' Kwon) Elise Model 01.jpg|Elise Model 1 (by Riot Artist Cody 'Sstrikerr' Bunt) Elise Model 02.jpg|Elise Model 2 (by Riot Artist Cody 'Sstrikerr' Bunt) Elise Model 03.jpg|Elise Model 3 Elise Model 04.jpg|Elise Model 4 01SI053-full.png|Elise "Legends of Runeterra" Illustration 01SI053T2-full.png|Spider Queen Elise "Legends of Runeterra" Illustration Elise Victorious Promo.png|Victorious Elise Promo (by Riot Artist Paul 'Zeronis' Kwon) Elise BloodMoon Concept 01.jpg|Blood Moon Elise Concept (by Riot Artist Paul 'Zeronis' Kwon) Elise BloodMoon Model 01.png|Blood Moon Elise Model 1 (by Riot Artist Cody 'Sstrikerr' Bunt) Elise BloodMoon Model 02.png|Blood Moon Elise Model 2 (by Riot Artist Cody 'Sstrikerr' Bunt) Elise BloodMoon Model 03.png|Blood Moon Elise Model 3 (by Riot Artist Cody 'Sstrikerr' Bunt) Elise SuperGalaxy Concept 01.jpg|Super Galaxy Elise Concept 1 (by Riot Artist Paul 'Zeronis' Kwon) Elise SuperGalaxy Concept 02.jpg|Super Galaxy Elise Concept 2 (by Riot Artist Paul 'Zeronis' Kwon) Elise SuperGalaxy Concept 03.jpg|Super Galaxy Elise Concept 3 (by Riot Artist Paul 'Zeronis' Kwon) Elise SuperGalaxy Concept 04.jpg|Super Galaxy Elise Concept 4 (by Riot Artist Paul 'Zeronis' Kwon) 2017 SuperGalaxy concept 01.jpg|2017 Super Galaxy Skins Concept (by Riot Artist Paul 'Zeronis' Kwon) |-|Summoner Icons= Super Galaxy Elise profileicon.png|Super Galaxy Elise Category:Champion development Category:Elise